All the Prophets in all the World

All the Prophets in all the World (2024)

Premieres June 27, 2024

An intellectual look inside the insidious dynamic of cultic relationships where leaders achieve unconditional love, control over people's minds, bodies, and individual ethics.


Director: Carla Barraez

Producers: Tropic of Cancer Films, arla Barraez

Cast:
Patrick Ryan
Dr. Stephen Kent
Dr. Kate Balestrieri

Dr. Michael Burns

Once thriving Church of Scientology faces extinction, says cult tracker

Geoff Mcmaster

University of Alberta Folio

January 11, 2018

Unable to change with the times, the controversial belief system is doomed to fail. 

"Stephen Kent knew he'd become a threat when the Church of Scientology sent no fewer than 16 letters to University of Alberta administrators demanding he stop disparaging the church. 

"They wrote letter after letter to different levels of administration-from the president on down-to curtail my activities, to silence me, to get me somehow sanctioned," said the sociologist and cult expert. 

It's not surprising when you consider Kent has been tracking the tactics of the church since the early 1980s. As a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University, he began collecting stories of confinement, sexual assault and coercion not widely known at the time. 

Since then he's amassed one of the world's biggest collections of testimonials and documents on Scientology, and last year co-edited a book with former student Susan Raine, now a professor at MacEwan University, called Scientology in Popular Culture. 

Kent has also become a top go-to expert for media commentary. Just last month he was quoted in the Irish Times when the newspaper discovered the church had sent thousands of pamphlets to Irish schools under the guise of a human rights organization-just one recent attempt in a concerted campaign to infiltrate Irish society and promote the doctrine of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. 

But in Kent's view, the strategy may be just a desperate ploy to stay alive. There has been significant opposition to Scientology in Ireland, he said. The last census revealed its membership at just 87, reflecting a more global public relations crisis that has been plaguing the church for years."

"Historically, most new religions die, and it's fairly clear now that Scientology is on a downward path," said Kent.

The seeds of Scientology

The Church of Scientology was created by Hubbard in 1954, developed from ideas he presented a few years earlier in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. A form of self-help psychology, the book was a populist challenge to questionable psychiatric practices of the time, such as lobotomies and electroshock therapy.

Although the principles of Hubbard's therapeutic process have never been accepted by science, said Kent, they initially held considerable appeal as "the poor person's psychoanalysis."

Hubbard claimed people could free themselves of the trauma and neurosis associated with painful events of the past-what he calls engrams-by answering a series of questions in "auditing" sessions, the content tested by a lie detector, or e-meter. After enough of these sessions, so the theory goes, the debilitating engrams are erased, and the person reaches a state of being "clear," capable of fulfilling their full potential.

To avoid charges of practising medicine without a licence, Hubbard rebranded his pseudo-therapy as a religion-calling it Scientology-and proved adept at exploiting celebrity culture to promote it.

"Movie stars in Hollywood had significant status, and Hubbard realized these people influenced popular consumer trends," said Kent. "He figured out early on that getting media endorsements from key celebrities would be beneficial for his organization."

By the '60s and '70s, Scientology's membership exploded with the countercultural movement, emphasizing self-knowledge, spiritual fulfilment, a distrust of established medical science and aspirations towards world peace.

https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2018/01/once-thriving-church-of-scientology-faces-extinction-says-cult-tracker.html

Are conspiracy theories really 'a new religion'?

If you think we’re living in an unprecedented era of conspiracy theories, think again

Nahlah Ayed
CBC Radio
October 31, 2020

Listen to: Ideas: The Conspiracy Rush

You're not imagining things: conspiracy theories are leaving the fringes for the mainstream to drive real-life action, from protests against coronavirus restrictions, to the rejection of vaccines, to the burning of cell towers — to possibly even murder.

Social media is rife with wild, conspiracist explanations for our era's multiple shocks. They've become so pervasive that we're now used to hearing them from the current U.S. president.

QAnon, an American movement based on multiple conspiracy theories (including the belief that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against an elite global cabal of pedophiles) has been described as "a new religion," and is now making inroads into Canada and abroad.

Conspiracy theories are appealing to people in particular when they have important psychological needs that are not being satisfied.- Karen Douglas, University of Kent professor

Are we, as many recent headlines suggest, living in a "golden age" of conspiracy theory?

Not quite, according to Michael Butter, one of the world's foremost scholars of conspiracy theory.

"For a long time, people thought that all this talk about conspiracy theories means that they must have become more popular and influential," said Butter, a professor of American Studies at the University of Tubingen in Germany.

"I would argue that all this [current] talk about conspiracy theories indicates that they are now perceived as a problem." 

Conspiracy game-changer

The public stigmatization of conspiracy theories began in the 1960s, after years of discussion in European academic ivory towers. Before that, said Butter, conspiracy theories were treated as an acceptable form of knowledge — and were therefore more influential and more widespread than they are today.

One example was the widespread belief that the Illuminati, a secret society dedicated to Enlightenment values, were behind the French Revolution. Another theory that Butter cites is the 18th century belief in the United States that pro-slavery interests were secretly working to nationalize slavery beyond the South, with some versions of the conspiracy theory claiming the ultimate goal was to enslave the white working class.

It was a time when the loaded term "conspiracy theory" had not yet even come into everyday use.

The game-changers in the Western history of conspiracy theory came in the form of the Red Scare over Communist infiltrators in the U.S., and, as you might expect, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. The latter remains the subject of countless conspiracy theories: including some that variously blame the CIA or Cuba or the Mafia for the killing.

The assassination of JFK, says Butter, was the first major event in which conspiracy theories were publicly discredited and labeled as such. It was then that the term "conspiracy theory" became so widely used that many came to believe that the term itself was coined by the CIA specifically to discredit the assassination theories.

It wasn't. The first use of the term in its modern sense is credited to British-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, just after the Second World War. He was one of the vanguard of thinkers then to suggest conspiracy theories developed as a form of theism, an attempt to "fill a void that has been left by the Enlightenment" and the abandonment of religion.

Still, there is no doubt that in the years since, the U.S. has become one of the most prolific and innovative crucibles of conspiracism in the world, leading to the birth in 2017 of QAnon, the mother of all super-conspiracies.

"To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory, but the birth of a new religion," wrote Adrienne LaFrance for The Atlantic magazine.

Her argument is that QAnon is a "movement united in mass rejection of reason", that provides a deep sense of belonging and something akin to a worldview.

While there are likely more conspiracy theories today than there were early in the last century, there are still likely proportionally fewer believers — and Butter says conspiracy theories have nowhere near the legitimacy or impact they would have had back then.

'A newly empowered threat in 2020'

There are, however, two new features in America's long history with conspiracy theory thinking, said Molly Worthen, historian of religion and politics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

And both warrant serious attention: the internet and Donald Trump.

"The way the internet has empowered people to assemble a sense that they are really uncovering a world of facts and connecting with like-minded people who are awake to the true reality, the hidden reality, is so much more powerful today than it has ever been in the past," Worthen told Nahlah Ayed, host of CBC Radio's IDEAS.

"I struggle to point to a previous period in American history when our commander-in-chief was so forthright in his endorsements of these conspiracies. There's just no analogy to that," she added.

Trump, Worthen maintains, has "constantly demonstrated" his inclination to weaponize conspiracist thinking. All this makes conspiracy theories "a newly empowered threat in 2020."

For the U.S. and the rest of the world, conspiracism spikes at times of instability and ambiguity, such as the current pandemic. Trust in public institutions, social dislocation and fears of downward mobility are all factors.

"I would argue that conspiracy theories are appealing to people in particular when they have important psychological needs that are not being satisfied, especially by official explanations of events," said Karen Douglas, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the U.K.

She has been studying the psychology of conspiracy theories for 12 years. Factors include the need for social connection, knowledge and information, and security and safety.

"Believing in conspiracy theories might seem to help people think that they're restoring a sense of power," said Douglas.

Conspiracy feeds the powerless

Individually, conspiracy theory also satisfies the need to stand out from the crowd, even above it. Especially at a time when demographic and socio-economic shifts are disrupting received notions of class, gender, even merit.

The so-called "conspiracy rush" could be part of the lure, said Butter. It's an intense physical sensation, the sudden feeling you're seeing the world anew, that you're onto something that "they" — the official and traditional sources of authority — either can't, or won't, tell you.

It may be the reason why conspiracists often become attached to the process of research — going down the proverbial rabbit hole — something QAnon encourages.

They also appeal to the powerless, and people who believe they are losing power, said Butter.

Another factor in the growing ubiquity of conspiracism is the longstanding scepticism about science, academics and expertise, said Worthen, a phenomenon that she has documented among conservative evangelicals.

So who is most susceptible? There isn't one single answer to that question, and it remains a matter of debate. But researchers have identified some trends: Gen Xers, for example, are among those more susceptible because of the momentous and "anomalous" era of assassinations and coups in which they grew up.

Studies also indicate that people who are "really bad at accepting ambiguity and uncertainty" are more likely to be drawn to such theories, said Butter.

While there is no specific profile, he said, studies suggest a higher susceptibility among males, the less educated and older people.

But ultimately, said Douglas, "everybody is susceptible to conspiracy theories."


Guests in this episode:

Michael Butter is professor of American studies at the University of Tubingen, and most recently the author of The Nature of Conspiracy Theories.

Karen Douglas is a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent, and the co-author of Social Psychology.

Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, and the author of The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/are-conspiracy-theories-really-a-new-religion-1.5782172

The grooming of children for sexual abuse in religious settings: Unique characteristics and select case studies

Susan Raine(a) and Stephen A. Kent
Aggression and Violent Behavior
Volume 48, September–October 2019, Pages 180-189

Abstract

"This article examines the sexual grooming of children and their caregivers in a wide variety of religious settings. We argue that unique aspects of religion facilitate institutional and interpersonal grooming in ways that often differ from forms of manipulation in secular settings. Drawing from Christianity (Catholicism, Protestantism, and Seventh-day Adventism) and various sects (the Children of God, the Branch Davidians, the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints, a Hindu ashram, and the Devadasis), we show how some religious institutions and leadership figures in them can slowly cultivate children and their caregivers into harmful and illegal sexual activity. A number of uniquely religious characteristics facilitate this cultivation, which includes: theodicies of legitimation; power, patriarchy, obedience, protection, and reverence towards authority figures; victims' fears about spiritual punishments; and scriptural uses to justify adult-child sex."

Full Article is available until December 1, 2019.

Susan Raine

Department of Sociology, Grant MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J4S2
Corresponding author.
raines4@macewan.ca

Stephen A. Kent

Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G2H4
The authors express gratitude to the University of Alberta Library for access to the Stephen A. Kent Collection on Alternative Religions.